Successful technologies today seldom come about due to a grand “Eureka” event. Rather, they come from lots of people all having little Eurekas and little “damn, I was sure that would work” moments. -Clark Lindsey

What is it? A new mode of transportation that’s supposed to be very fast like Concorde, on ground level and requires no rails.

What could it be? Dylan thinks it’s a tube mail system. Jacques thinks so as well, and says Elon said it’s not a vacuum tube.

Here’s my not entirely serious guess (lots of problems here):

A two dimensional low drag (subsonic laminar flow) body suspended from a single maglev rail. One problem is sideways acceleration: you can’t tilt and generate vertical (eyeballs-up) lift with this, only sideways lift, which would feel quite uncomfortable to passengers, unless maybe you tilt the seats. It might be best to keep it aerodynamically neutral and let the rail do all the guiding. The two dimensional shape is nice for entering though, since it can easily be standing height. The door must be at the rear since there can be no breaks in the front of the fuselage. I imagine it could be relatively silent, traveling around 400 km/h (100 m/s) in the countryside. It could be relatively easy to integrate right into city centers as well, seeing it doesn’t claim much ground space except at stations. Since the cabin only has single dimensional curvature, it would be extremely easy, quick and cheap to build with high aerodynamic quality. You could build thousands very quickly by contractors. The magnetic head could be complicated though since it would need active clearance control. Energy usage could approach that of bicycling, the king of efficient transport.

On a strained related note, it’s also interesting that Helsinki is pondering a suspended cable car to link the eastern island of Laajasalo to the city center directly. That could bring the city’s land prices up quite significantly, making the large transport investment profitable.

Haven’t really had the time and stuff feels so clunky. WordPress feels quite old-fashioned. With modern blogging platforms you ought to be able to drag photos to upload in the background and whatever. I have valtteri.openphoto.me for occasional photos but it lacks one core functionality: to actually show the photos in any reasonable size. As a result it’s almost useless.

Maybe I should install something else than wordpress, but I don’t want to spend time in configuration hell…

Flynano, the sub-70 kg carbon fiber seaplane designed to go around regulations by sheer lack of mass. Their first prototype that was retired and is now exhibited at verkkokauppa in Jätkäsaari, Helsinki, Finland. I took a few photos, more after the break.

1. You catch more photons from the same target with a bigger aperture. With more photons, there is less randomness.

2. A small pixel saturates with less photons than a large one. If you have low dynamic range, you either blow highlights or lower the exposure so that highlights are not blown, but then you get more noise in the shadows.

What this does not mean

A larger sensor by itself does NOT improve low light capability. The lens with a certain aperture diameter (mm) can only catch so many photons*

You have to enlarge the optics to get a good low light performance, not the sensor. You can keep a smaller sensor and just enlarge the optics to reach the same result as with big optics and big sensor.

What you are being sold

Let’s see what cameras are sold with:

A. Zoom factor. More of this usually includes the lens design tradeoff of making the aperture much smaller so it hurts low light performance.

B. Megapixels. More of them means the pixels are smaller and that lowers dynamic range.

As a result we get cameras that have blown highlights and/or noisy dark areas outdoors (too small pixels) at best, and completely noisy images everywhere when used inside (too small aperture).

The fix would be:

1. Enlargen the aperture. So throw away the zoom lenses and go with well designed primes. Immediate improvement in low light performance.

2. Lessen the amount of megapixels. People have to resize down for web anyway. 2 megapixels could be good. 1000×2000 is bigger than almost any web graphics. One could go down to half a megapixel, 500×1000.

The results could be phenomenal. The photos could be indistinguishable from full frame DSLR photos at the same half megapixel resolution and modest focal lengths! Except maybe for background defocus. Even a 0.7 megapixel image won’t fit here, you have to click it:

A 0.7 megapixel image by Jean-Marie Huet. WordPress isn’t very good with images I’m afraid so you have to click the image. It’s shot with a 5 D mark II.

Changed the title picture again. Air happened to be in such a configuration that the smoke from the hood district heating plant travelled horizontally. It uses fuel oil and isn’t in use most days. Only when it’s quite cold like today (about -10 C).

Making coal electricity and using the waste heat for district heating apartment buildings is quite effective and has a pretty low workload compared to separate houses and oil heaters or what you have.

There isn’t any really good “green” solution for this. Making district heat with wood has its problems for example, and having heat pumps everywhere is inefficient and even inelegant in many senses. First making electricity with a low efficiency and then using that to make heat again with a low multiplier. You need magnets and bearings and whatnot in both devices. Are there even enough rare earths?

Building nuclear plants close to cities isn’t nice either. If you built them far away, you’d need to build really long pipes and that gets inefficient again. It also hurts the nuke’s electricity output surprisingly much. You could probably optimize the plant for better district heat production though, and the Russians have done that in some cold cities. But you can’t have a single nuclear plant as the only thing that’s heating a city: it would be devastating if an unplanned break left a million people cold in their homes.

In the future though, buildings can be much more energy efficient, so that’s the biggest saver. That too can be overdone, and I don’t like many modern buildings which have tiny awkwardly placed windows. A human produces about 70 watts of heat, and electronic equipment produces some waste heat too. “Zero energy” houses can take the heat from the exiting air and use it to heat the incoming air (like penguins do with the blood in their feet), making large savings (and at the same time making it hard to retrofit some old buildings.)

Dividing Finland’s yearly energy consumption with all the seconds in the year and all the people, we get nine kilowatts of constant power, day and night, summer and winter, for each person. That’s huge.

One big part of that is heating. It’s also a big missing part of the discussion.